Dr. Keith Robinson has some thoughts in his blog post. Perhaps consumables will be cheaper and fast turnaround would be attractive for small labs. Cores may find this useful for QC'ing pools/libraries too.

Cheaper instruments from the orange empire typically mean higher cost per sample. The other piece to Firefly is the module (shipping sometime later in 2018 IIRC) that can perform sample prep for this same box (like the now defunct NeoPrep).

I was trying to understand the niche of Firefly from that tweet. 6M reads, length of 2x150, 16 hour runtime. That sounds very similar to a MiSeq micro run.

I've been thinking about this for a while. My best guess is that the Firefly, paired with the future sample prep module, is best positioned against Qiagen's GeneReader (which is solely going after the clinical market). Apart from that, it's not clear that this configuration is solving a big problem currently facing the research market.

It has been in development for 2+ years so I guess they have to try and recover some of the development costs. Initial cost of entry seems to be low and the whole thing appears "fool"-proof so pretty much anyone can use it. There are always those who want to have the "latest" in their labs. It could be a QC machine for large cores to balance library pools for large projects.

I guess the low instrument cost and the small size are supposed to sway people who are impressed by the nanopore instruments? despite the data being of completely different nature.
I twill totally depend on the reagent costs if this system becomes relevant.

If the flowcell price is correct it seems that the instrument is currently only of interest in cases where speed is of absolute priority (although the IonTorrents should still be faster) - and perhaps the simplified operation. I guess the libraries would still have to be quantified well to achieve good data.

Turnaround is really important. The market for these machines is the ~$100 per bacterial genome smaller groups. 1.2 Gbp is about 8-10 bacteria at 30X coverage. If the libraries are cheap enough (~$30) then those smaller labs that want to pay $100 per bacterial genome are going to be happy. Our core is small enough that it's hard to regularly queue up 200 bacterial genomes even if the price is good with our NextSeq.